Examples of vascular devices that can be delivered by the system are fixation staples or clips, occlusion coils, anastamosis devices and stents which are to be at least partially passed through the walls of a previously implanted graft. The delivery system enables staples, clips or other fixation devices to be passed from within the lumen of a vessel, through the wall of a graft or stent-graft and at least partially through the wall of the vessel, thereby attaching the graft or stent-graft to the vessel wall.
Endoluminal surgery is a rapidly expanding field and permits implants to be delivered and minor surgical procedures to be carried out within the lumen of vessels, most commonly in arteries. The main instruments used in the technique to traverse the arterial tree, from a puncture site in the skin to the destination site of the procedure, are guide wires, which pass through the vessel, and catheters, which are passed over the guide wires. By appropriate choice of combinations of guide wire and catheter, the system can be advanced through the vascular tree to the desired delivery site. Frequently, a stent or stent-graft (which are essentially open cylindrical structures) are passed through the catheter from outside the patient to the delivery site and, when released, these stents or stent-grafts expand to lie coaxially with the native vessel, their walls lying in close contact with the walls of the vessel.
Currently, it is very difficult to direct a guide wire or catheter into the wall of a vessel at a specific site because wires and catheters tend to lie approximately parallel to the axis of a vessel. Surgery will be eased by the ability to follow a guide wire along the axis of a vessel to a certain point and then to be able to move laterally away from the guide wire to deliver an implant in a position which is displaced from the wire, possibly in the wall of the vessel and not parallel to (and preferably at an angle approaching 90° to) the principal axis of the vessel.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,957,863 (Boston Scientific) and U.S. Pat. No. 6,283,960 (Oratec Interventions, Inc.) both disclose delivery systems in which a deflectable shaft/catheter is employed which may be deflected towards a vessel wall by pulling on a deflection wire attached to one side of the tip of the shaft/catheter. However, the relatively small radius of cross-section of the shaft/catheter tip results in a very small moment of deflection.